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A scientist's brain scans produce a photo album of the soul
Posted on Monday, June 30, 2008 (CDT) by Isis
 The doctor asks the nun to begin her centering prayer. It's a Catholic method of prayer, goes back to the 14th century, a form of deep meditation. The nun sits straight, in silence. She closes her eyes and focuses on a sacred word, or small prayer. She "rests in God." A catheter dangles from her arm. After 45 minutes, the doctor injects her with a radioactive tracer. He lets her pray 10 more minutes as the tracer in her bloodstream wends its way through her brain.
Then he leads the nun into his lab, has her lie down, and scans her brain. He's using a process called single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT. It's a common technique in nuclear medicine, used to photograph the brains of patients suffering anything from seizures to brain trauma to heart disease to Alzheimer's.
The nun isn't sick. She's "on God."
She's a
person of faith donating the use of her brain to a scientist — Dr.
Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania. Amid today's
ideological struggles between people of faith and science, that kind of
collaboration sounds heretical.
But Newberg is among a
small group of doctors and scientists on a different track. They do not
find science and faith incompatible. They are using sophisticated
technology to hunt down and map the soul.
Newberg, a professor of
radiology and psychiatry, is not religious. He's Jewish by birth, but
Judaism isn't a big part of his life. If a dying patient asked him to
pray beside him, he'd do it. But he wouldn't lead the prayer. When his
8-year-old daughter asks him about God, he answers her with a question:
"What do you think?"
But he has searched for
spirituality in the brain for almost 20 years. He has probed the brains
of praying nuns, meditating Buddhist monks, and Pentecostals as they
speak in tongues. He has written three books: Why God Won't Go Away,
The Mystical Mind, and his most recent, Why We Believe What We Believe.
He has another book coming out next year.
Scientific exploration of
spirituality has quietly prospered outside the red zone of Darwinism,
creationism, embryonic stem cell research and abortion. Newberg is a
noncombatant. "The actual battle is overblown," he says from his lab in
Philadelphia. "It focuses on extremists. It leads people to think
scientists believe religion is a bunch of crap.''
In Why We Believe, Newberg suggests the human brain can't function without beliefs, without a search for meaning.
"In spite of our lapses of
memory, our inconsistencies of logic, and the inherent shortcomings of
consciousness, humans have done a pretty good job at surviving. For
better or worse, we reinvent the world every day, searching for the
ultimate reality we call truth, enlightenment, or God."
Besides, he wanted to know what's going on in there.
In the early '90s, Newberg
had fallen under the mentorship of psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili, an
early pioneer in the effects of religious and mystical experiences on
the brain.
Newberg was then a student
at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. He was completing an
extra year of research in nuclear medicine. But he had always been
interested in psychiatry and brain research. D'Aquili's work looked
especially novel, esoteric.
He made a pitch to
d'Aquili: Why not test your theories in the brain scan lab, using human
guinea pigs? Why not photograph brains during religious experiences?
They found willing
volunteers among three disparate groups: Tibetan Buddhist monks,
cloistered nuns and Pentecostals who speak in tongues.
Starting with the monks and nuns, they shot them up with radioactive isotopes and zapped them with the SPECT machine.
If the brain houses such things as souls, they did locate them:
Everywhere.
Looking for belief in the
brain is like looking for God in the universe, Newberg writes. "God is
everywhere and nowhere, depending on whom you ask, and the same holds
true for beliefs: They seem to be everywhere and nowhere in the brain,
again depending on whom you ask."
But as Newberg combed
through his brain scans of nuns and monks, some hot spots were obvious.
The frontal lobes got especially busy. They're the part of the brain he
calls the "attention area." The meditators had clearly tapped their
frontal lobes to focus on their task.
He also saw the thalamus
kick in. That's a pea-sized piece of the brain atop the brain stem
that, among other things, sends sensory information to the frontal
cortex, where much of our heavy thinking happens. Whatever was
happening in meditation, the thalamus was making it feel very real.
The surprise was elsewhere,
in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that helps us orient
ourselves in relation to things around us. Newberg discovered that the
nuns and Buddhists had actually shut down that part of the brain,
suspending their senses of space and time. It was then that they
entered the peak of their transcendent experiences — altered states of
"timelessness and spacelessness."
Why the brain does it, no one knows.
But it's not by accident.
Newberg is still looking.
His next book, How God Changes Your Brain, comes out in March. It
includes an online survey of people's different religious experiences.
He concluded Why We Believe
by saying we may never know all of why we believe. "It is the questions
that give us meaning, that drive us forward and fill us with
transcendent awe."
All the scientist really
knows is what he tells his 8-year-old daughter when she invents another
new notion of God, of faith, of truth.
"Isn't that interesting?"
Copyright: St. Petersburg Times
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